When Tom Brokaw told his friend Garry Trudeau that he had begun working on a documentary about 1968, the Doonesbury cartoonist had a question for the former NBC News anchor who'd coined the term "The Greatest Generation" to define Americans who came of age during World War II.

"What are you going to call this one, "The Worst Generation?"

It's not exactly a cheap shot, considering the source.

Trudeau's strip was born in the counterculture maelstrom that sprouted in 1967 and flowered in 1968, but he's used it as a forum ever since to comment on the life passages experienced by that era's archetypes.

No political or social persuasion gets a free pass in Doonesbury, but Trudeau is as hard on old hippies as he is on old frat boys.

For either camp, cliches just can't capture the dense legacy of 1968.

Brokaw, who as a Los Angeles-based correspondent for NBC covered many of the events he revisits in the documentary, has done his best to get at some of the complexities beneath the hippies-versus-hardhats caricatures that the 1960s represent to subsequent generations.

The two-hour film premieres at 8 p.m. Sunday on The History Channel. An accompanying book, "Boom! Voices of the Sixties, Personal Reflections on the '60s and Today," is already a bestseller.

"I arrived in California, working for NBC in 1966, just four years off the Great
Plains, (from a) working-class family (living in a) small town, a real product of the '50s, thinking, 'Here I am in California, which is on the cutting edge of change,' having no idea about how much more change was to come -- good, bad, tragic, and triumphant," said Brokaw, who met with TV critics in Los Angeles during production of the documentary. "I am treating this as a virtual reunion, (interviewing) the people who went through it, what they thought then, what they think now. You'll hear a lot of voices. Unfortunately, this is one of those times in American life when everyone has their own prism, and they think what they saw, what they experienced, is the defining experience.

"Those who were on the left and protesting on the streets said, 'We changed the world. We were the defining force.' People on the right will tell you, 'No, we changed the world because we took your mistakes and capitalized on them to elect Richard Nixon and start the Reagan revolution here in California and, later, two terms of Ronald Reagan as President of the United States.'

"Pat Buchanan and others who I've talked to have said, '1968 was a gift to us. In 1964 we were knocked on our backside by LBJ and the Goldwater Campaign. A lot of people were writing off the Republican Party. Sixty-eight comes along, and we can say to the rest of the country, "Is that what you want running your country? Is this what you want for behavior and in the White House?" and capitalize on it.'

"Then, you have that whole group in the middle, the working-class Americans who had a different attitude about it, who were conflicted by what was going on. You had the working-class dad who may have been a veteran of World War II, who came home in 1968, sat down at the dinner table, looked up and saw his son with hair down to here, an American flag for a shirt, his daughter without a bra with her boyfriend with whom she was living, and wondered how he landed on this planet."

Interviews for the piece include the Tom and Dick Smothers, Bruce Springsteen, Arlo Guthrie, Jon Stewart and many direct participants in the social, cultural and political movements that defined the year.

The afternoon after meeting with the critics, Brokaw was off to interview Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas, who in the special speaks fondly of her 1960s experiences with psychedelic drugs but expresses gratitude that cocaine hadn't yet become chic.

The day after that, Brokaw headed to San Francisco to interview Dr. David Smith, who ran the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic in 1968.

In the film, Smith has fewer fond memories of the dope scene than Phillips, an outlook shared by Brokaw, who in the special replays some of his own dispatches from San Francisco in '68.

"I think there was too much tolerance for hardcore drug use, for the unregulated experiments with LSD, which in many cases turned out to be
very disastrous for a lot of people, and that became the zeitgeist of the time," Brokaw said. "It's just hard to tell people now what it was like to be up there in '67
and '68 with kids pouring in from all over the country, completely ripped on stuff we'd never even heard of before, drugs of all kinds.

"So that line, 'If you remember the '60s, you weren't there,' I don't find wildly amusing, because I see the carnage from a lot of drug use at that time."

Near the end of his interview session with the critics, Brokaw was asked to pick 1968's most significant historical event.

The documentary offers many potential candidates, including the Tet Offensive, the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., and the Chicago Democratic Convention, among others.

Brokaw's answer: "That we survived."

"I don't say that lightly," he continued. "This country was up for grabs in
many ways. We had this war going on, with kids in the street, marching in Washington, National Guardsmen that you saw there in gas masks, facing them down. That we came out of Chicago, where there was a breakdown in the streets, and that we were able to have elections, and that people were able to accept the results of those elections. Richard Nixon was inaugurated, and a lot of the country was unhappy, but a lot of the country had voted for him.

"For me, at the time, there were two big lessons. One was how quickly it can change, the fundamental assumptions that we have about society and our government. And then, two, the resilience of the American people. 1968 was the beginning of the profound distrust of the American government, and we're still working our way through that. That was accelerated by Watergate, but '68 had a lot to do with it.

"In the larger universe, the real similarities between then and now are only that we've got a war going. We don't have a draft going on. We don't have people in the streets in the way that we did in the '60s.

"I think that in 1968 people still had a strong feeling that they could affect governmental decisions, that they could change the course of society -- left, right or in the middle. I talk about this a lot as I go around the country. I think that there's now a distancing between the institutions of political authorities and where the people are in the streets. Some of it has to do with the new technology, that we've got too many kids thinking they're leading a virtual life and that it's a real life.

"Mostly, I think people feel left out of the political process. Because the '60s gave rise to, across the political spectrum, very well-organized political groups that were not interested in common ground, but were interested in advancing only what they were interested in. And the great challenge for the society is how you rise above that, and I think that's what a lot of 2008 is going to be."

TV columnist Dave Walker can be reached at dwalker@timespicayune.com or (504) 826-3429.